Update: As if by magic, Tony Blair appears and contradicts his own minister by saying farmers should start preparing to put their birds into quarantine... (And, irritatingly, the BBC have simply updated the earlier story, rather than creating a new page. I really wish they would stop doing that.)

3 Comments:

The problem with vaccinating poultry is that it does nothing to prevent the disease. Whilst a vaccinated bird won't show signs of illness, it will still be able to spread the virus. A consumer therefore will not know (because the producer will not know) whether the meat is H5N1-free or not. Besides the obvious threat to human health, this will also make it harder to detect the virus on the ground.

China has undertaken a complete vaccination of their poultry and is now detecting human cases where no obvious signs of the virus exist. That is the sort of thing one might expect if all poultry were vaccinated, although it isn't clear that this is the cause in these cases.

Perhaps they're thinking if the whole of Western Europe protects itself we'll be fine. Like invading Poland as buffer..

seriously, I'd trust the Farmer's unions less than the EU governments. They'd get better money from compensation with a mass culling than they would from selling their birds to supermarkets. I only have cynicism as evidence for my last statements, but oh my what cynacism